Philhellenism and Orientalism in Germany Suzanne Marchand Introduction. The divergence of the disciplines Most readers of Lynchos will probably know something about the history of classical scholarship, and, understandably, regard the period of post- 1790 secularization and specialization as one of great progress. That it was, in many respects; the sharpening of text-critical skills and the driving out of wild speculations and politicized argumentation did indeed lay the foundations for the professionalization of classical scholarship, especially in the university-rich territory of German-speaking central (and especially northern) Europe. But a great part of this professionalizing process – and one under-reported in such classic accounts as Ulrich von Wilamowitz- Moellendorff’s History of classical scholarship (1921) – also entailed the closing of some doors.1 Most obviously being slammed shut were the passageways that once allowed scholars to wander between classics, theo- logy, and the study of the ancient Near East; and as classics and classicists increasingly claimed one set of rooms in the house of ancient history for themselves, they compelled others, too, to adapt to new accommodations. That accommodation is by no means so well-known a story; in part this is the result of the way in which the history of nineteenth-century orien- talist scholarship, too, fails to recognize not only the deep roots of the discipline but also its ongoing focus on the ancient world, and long-lasting classics-envy.2 It is my contention that one gets a much richer and better picture of changes in the disciplinary landscape and the significance of the disciplinary divergences that began around 1790 by recognizing that Orientalistik was, like classics, a child of Christian humanism; it was, importantly, the sibling left to tend the cavernous old house when the classicists remodeled their rooms and locked the doors. By viewing the story of philological specialization from the perspective of this younger sibling – rather than that of the older brother – I hope to illuminate some of the institutional as well as intellectual consequences of the closing of the doors referred to above. At the conclusion of the essay I will discuss a certain sort of re-convergence of classics and Orientalistik at the end of the nineteenth century in the hopes of sparking further inquiry into the relationship between disciplines that once were sister sciences, and now, all too often, view one another as strangers. As numerous works – new and old – have shown, there were vigorous debates in the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries about the Carolina Rediviva och de projekterade rummen 167 origins of religion and the Bible’s historical veracity and philosophical originality; arguments raged over who came first, Moses, Plato, or Hermes Trismegistus, as well as over New Testament variants.3 Some of the most respected scholars were men who worked on both biblical and classical texts (or even, too, on some ‘heathen’ ones): examples here would include Joseph Scaliger, Isaac Casaubon, Richard Bentley, and C. G. Heyne. If we take Heyne – the youngest of these figures – as our example, we find a man who, like most other Christian humanists and professional philolo- gists of his day, read both Greek and Hebrew, and moved easily between West and East.4 Thinking more broadly of Heyne’s era, one might recall Friedrich Schlegel’s enormous enthusiasm both for the Greeks and for the ancient Indians, or Herder’s extensive writings on Hebrew poetry; the learned world of Gibbon and the young Goethe found oriental pagans nearly as fascinating as Hellenic ones. Heyne well knew that in his day, most of those with refined philological skills found employment as pastors (as was the case for Herder) or (like himself) as professors in the theolo- gical faculty. No wonder that Heyne advised his student F. A. Wolf that matriculating as a classical philologist in the philosophical faculty would be to set out on “the straight road to starvation”.5 But Wolf, of course, did it anyway. The story of Wolf’s successful pioneering of this specialized path and Prussia’s founding of the classical Gymnasien as gateways to the univer- sities (and thereby, to jobs in the state bureaucracy and to status as a ‘cultured citizen,’ or Bildungsbürger) has been told many times, and need not be told again here.6 What we need to be reminded of is that Wolf’s great triumph in institutionalizing the secular study of the classics was accompanied by a narrowing of the field of ‘scientific’ inquiry; now re- spectable classicists were supposed to leave the New Testament and other religious questions to the theologians, and the study of the Near East to those who specialized in ‘oriental’ languages. The importance of the Creuzer Streit What might happen to a classicist who continued to act as an eighteenth- century érudit was demonstrated by the experience of Friedrich Creuzer, whose wide-ranging, multi-volume Symbolik (1810–12, 1819) became the antithesis of Wolf’s narrowly Greek-focused Darstellung der Altertum- wissenschaft (1807).7 Creuzer – a Greek philologist interested precisely in the subjects Wolf avoided, namely, Greece’s debts to the East, religion, and sexuality – relied upon Hellenistic literature (and some translated oriental texts; he was already typical of the new age in knowing no orien- tal languages himself) to trace the origins of Greek ideas to eastern ances- tors, a project that might have been popular a half-century earlier, but which flew in the face of the philhellenic norms and emerging scientific 168 Suzanne Marchand standards of the early nineteenth century. As George Williamson argues, the words used by Goethe to praise one of Creuzer’s opponents, Gottfried Hermann – “critical, Hellenic, and patriotic” – are telling: “critical, Hellenic, and patriotic” was precisely what Creuzer’s work, in the eyes of the increasingly powerful, liberal Protestant classicists, was not.8 Instead, critics argued, Creuzer’s book gave succor to ‘Romish’ priests, conserva- tive Christian mysticism, and dilettantes. Johann Voss, translator of the Homeric epics – as well as, in the 1780s, of the 1001 Nights9 – penned a two-volume Anti-Symbolik (1824–6) in which he called Creuzer “an agent of the Jesuits” and deplored his sinking of the ideal Greeks in the sexual swamp of the Orient.10 In an 1821 letter to the Austrian diplomat and scholar Joseph von Hammer Purgstall, Creuzer described the vehemence of Voss’s polemics, for him comparable to the condemnation of Bruno by the Inquisition: You must read Voss’s review of the Symbolik to learn how entirely misguided and crazy we are to believe that there were before and after Homer and in addition to this great hero other people in the world. Yes, we must be burnt, along with all others who think anything of the Orient, and of Moses, Zoroaster, Buddha and whatever else the liars are called. We are mystagogues and seducers of the young. In a word, we should renounce the devil and embrace Voss’s Mythologische Briefe as the book of books.11 In the wake of the Anti-Symbolik, Creuzer’s style of scholarship was dead, and the classicists, especially the newfangled specialists, carried the day. If we examine the next generation of German classicists, we find men of extraordinary learning such as Karl Otfried Müller and August Boeckh, but even so, men who largely ignored ‘oriental’ and biblical questions, and did not care for non-Attic or Hellenistic Greeks; J. G. Droysen was a great exception in this regard.12 Classical philology became the model of scientificness, and the Germanies (and especially Prussia) became the place to study the subject. When the Altes Museum opened near the Royal Palace in Berlin in 1830, it was stocked chiefly with classical sculp- tures and plaster casts. Philosophers, artists, and Gymnasium teachers regularly reiterated their belief that Greek sculpture represented the ideal union of natural beauty and artistic excellence and epitomized ancient civilization as a whole.13 It was that civilization – rational, natural, beau- tiful, manly, and free from any taint of religious superstition or aristocratic sumptuousness – that German liberals, in particular, longed to recreate on their own soil. The difficulties of professionalizing Orientalistik Having now very briefly traced the consequences of specialization and the rising influence of philhellenism on the history of classical scholarship Philhellenism and Orientalism in Germany 169 from about 1780 to the mid-nineteenth century, let us now do the same for classics’ ‘sister’ discipline, Orientalistik. It is the case that as early as the 1750s, J. D. Michaelis (who specialized in Hebrew, but also read Arabic and Persian) had begun to treat the Old Testament essentially as an ordinary national history, and to separate theological concerns from the study of secular, oriental history and literature. Appointed to the theological faculty at the University of Göttingen, Michaelis did manage to move to the philosophical faculty – but he did not manage to extricate himself from theological debates, for his work, which fueled the fires of the ‘higher criticism,’ was quite clearly connected to a particular, denomi- national (that is, liberal Protestant) strain of thought.14 Unlike in France, where, after the Revolution, Orientalistik was chiefly pursued by non- believers, in the Germanies, the field as a whole would never fully extri- cate itself from the religious questions that were so central to the major texts in Arabic, Hebrew, Sanskrit, Persian and even Egyptian literature.15 This is not to say, of course, that German orientalism was apolitical; on the contrary, debates over the proper means to reconcile science and faith during the Vormärz and after were political debates, as were, too, more ominously, discussions about relations between ‘Aryans’ and Jews; and the latter subject was, incidentally, at mid-century, one that theologians and orientalists, not biologists, were thought competent to address.